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Episode 119: 5 Tools for Optimizing Your Website
221 Plays4 years ago
In today’s episode Krista joins me for a discussion about 5 tools you can use to optimize your website and assess your websites health. One of those tools is going to be of particular relevance due to a big announcement by Google.
For the show notes, visit https://daveyandkrista.com/btb-episode-119/
Recommended
Transcript
Analyzing Traffic Trends in Google Analytics
00:00:05
Speaker
Where I'd spend most of my time is looking at traffic trends. That's, you know, I think going to be the most interesting thing for people as well as they get into Google Analytics. So looking at referral sources, you can actually go and find, okay, well, where is most of my traffic coming from? And you can see, okay, well, I have a lot of traffic coming from social and it will actually break down, you know, how much is coming from Pinterest and Facebook. And it's really not difficult to get to those spots.
Introduction to Brands at Book Show
00:00:34
Speaker
Welcome to the Brands at Book Show, where we help creative, service-based businesses build their brands and find more clients. I'm your host, Davy Jones.
Website Health Optimization Tools
00:00:44
Speaker
In today's episode, Krista joins me for a discussion about five tools you can use to optimize your website and assess your website's health. And one of those tools is going to be of particular relevance due to a big announcement by Google. Be sure to check out the show notes at DavianKrista.com for the resources we mentioned during the episode. And especially for this episode, we've created tutorials around many of the topics that we discuss.
00:01:07
Speaker
I want to hear from you. Let us know what kind of content you'd like to see on the Prancetbook podcast as we move forward. To leave your feedback, just send us a DM on Instagram at DavyandChrista. Now, on to the episode.
00:01:24
Speaker
Welcome back to another episode of the Brains of the Book podcast. I'm here with Krista, who's really going to be leading us today. We're chatting about really how to check the health of your website, how to make sure everything on your website is working as it should be.
Timing and Importance of Website Health Checks
00:01:37
Speaker
If you are a wedding industry pro, and I know that a lot of you who listen, this January-February season is probably one of your slower seasons. This is the time that a lot of creatives
00:01:48
Speaker
focus on working on their business and not just in their business. So we see a lot of people updating their websites now. We see a lot of people doing like planning and content planning. And if you have a little bit of time to work on your business, this is a great time to check the health of your website, especially if it's an older website or it's been up for a while.
00:02:07
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is something that I think can be overwhelming for people, and we're going to try to make it as simple as possible, you know, some of these different tools that we're going to use. So we're going to try to break it down and simplify it as much as possible. It's something that I don't think you have to do every single day, where I think you're going to overwhelm yourself in many ways. But like you suggested, if your website's been up for a while, you know, this is something that you should do, I would say, I mean, at least once a year, at the very least, if not maybe like,
00:02:32
Speaker
once a quarter checking some of these things out. One of these things we're going to be talking about is, I think, of paramount importance, at least in the near future, to make sure all is well. Excited to jump into that. Yes, I am too. Also freezing out here. Yes, it is so cold that it's like 9.30 in the morning when we're recording this. I don't think our pigs have even left their bed of hay yet this morning.
00:02:58
Speaker
Yeah, it is windy and cold outside for sure. Icy and snowy. I'm ready for summer. Yes, me too. Absolutely. Anyways, when summer rolls around, you want to have this already done so that you can get outside and enjoy the warm weather. So what's the first thing we're chatting about?
Google Search Console Overview
00:03:14
Speaker
We were talking about setting up Google Search Console. So first off, can you explain what is Google Search Console? Because I'm sure a lot of people don't even know what it is.
00:03:23
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Google Search Console is going to give you information around how your website performs in search and errors that Google has found that might be preventing your site from performing well in search. I think there's this misconception that
00:03:40
Speaker
Google is very secretive about how they rank websites and the data they want to give you and so on and so forth. It's true to a certain extent that we don't know the ins and outs of the algorithm that Google uses to rank sites, but they give us plenty of data. I think to a certain extent the opposite is true is that they give us so much data that it can be hard to figure out what we should focus on and maybe what's not worth our time.
00:04:06
Speaker
If you go to search.google.com, that's where you can set up Google Search Console. Okay. That does sound, even just hearing you explain what it is, it sounds a little overwhelming and I've been in it and I know what all of those things mean. So is there any part of Google Search Console that people should focus on?
00:04:24
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So, minimally, if you do nothing else, you want to go in and verify your site with Google Search Console. To verify your site, it changes through the past number of years, how you verify your site has changed a little bit. I think it's easier. I think Google actually does a pretty good job of explaining how you go about verifying your website. Whoever designed or developed your website could probably help you with that as well. But follow the directions, the prompts to set it up. Then once you get in there and set it up at minimum,
00:04:54
Speaker
I would get in there and submit sitemaps. So if you don't know if you have a sitemap or if you aren't sure how to make one, how does somebody go about doing that? Yeah, absolutely. So backing up a little bit. It's not a default thing on a website. Sure. But if you're using a modern website builder or modern website platform, and so what I mean by that is, you know, anything from like an up-to-date WordPress website or Squarespace or Showit or Wix, any of those, if you type in your website platform plus sitemap,
00:05:23
Speaker
All right, you'll probably be taken straight to a help article from your website platform on how to submit a site map. So that's certainly true for like show it Squarespace Wix, right? I do. I know on show it, you would create it through the WordPress side of your show it account.
00:05:40
Speaker
Well, sort of, right? So on Show It, if you have a Show It website, you'll actually submit two site maps. You'll submit a site map for your Show It website, and you'll submit a site map for your WordPress blog if you have a blog. So some Show It websites don't, you know, people don't blog, they just have their Show It website. Right. Is that typically done through Yoast? Do you recommend that as the best way to create a WordPress site map?
00:06:03
Speaker
Yes. On WordPress, whatever SEO plugin you decide to use, and we'll talk about SEO plugins a little bit more as we get into this episode. Our favorites, the ones that we've used before are going to be Yoast and SEO Press. Both have pro versions. We've used the pro version. I won't get too much into, do I really need the pro version? I'd say there's nothing about the pro version. It's not as if you're going to install the pro version and then all of a sudden start ranking.
00:06:30
Speaker
So, the Pro version will, one, give you more features, and two, give you tools that I think are just useful and time-saving. At the end of the day, Pro versions of SEO plugins aren't that expensive. I want to say Yoast is one of the more expensive ones and still probably in the ballpark of about $80 a year. SEO Press, I want to say is in the ballpark of $40 a year. There's another free one that I've heard really good things about called RankMath that you can check out too. But all of these can produce site maps for you.
00:06:58
Speaker
And again, whatever plugin you decide to use, if you put in Yoast sitemap, for instance, there's going to be a help article from Yoast explaining exactly where you can find your sitemap. Yeah, because you do need to generate it. It doesn't automatically create it for you. You have to adjust a few of the settings to get it to be published.
00:07:15
Speaker
Sure. When you create a sitemap, for those of you who don't know what a sitemap is, it is what it sounds like. It is a map of your website. If you don't submit a sitemap, it's not as if Google can't find the pages on your website, but it's like going into anything without a map.
00:07:31
Speaker
It's just maybe a little bit more difficult to find those pages and those resources without that map. What I would encourage you to do if you're on WordPress, settle on an SEO plugin. I think one of the three that I just mentioned are probably a good place to start. Again, if you're on ShowIt, you can be on the advanced blog tier, the basic blog tier. If you're on the basic blog tier, you have to use Yoast. I think it comes pre-installed with Yoast, but you wouldn't be able to add other plugins to that. Again, that's fine because Yoast should be able to produce a site map for you.
00:08:01
Speaker
But get in there and submit your sitemaps. Even just by submitting your sitemaps, I think you've taken a great step in the right direction. From there, there's a lot of other information there. I would not overwhelm yourself, especially if this is all new to you, with what all of that other information is. I would say that you can click around to different spots and you shouldn't be too worried about breaking stuff in there.
00:08:23
Speaker
You know, I don't think that there's a ton you can do. There's definitely stuff you can do. But I don't think there's a ton you can do just by clicking around that's going to, you know, mess anything up. You might filter data in a weird way. Oh yeah, but you're not going to mess up your current... It doesn't edit your current existing website. It just pulls in data from your website. Exactly. I mean, there's things that you can submit in there that might, you know, but point being is, you know, where I would go is I would go to the performance tab.
00:08:49
Speaker
And the performance tab, it won't populate right away. So you'll verify your site, you'll submit your site maps, you know, I would wait a few days maybe for information to start populating. But the performance tab will tell you how you're performing in search. And it's really interesting because it's going to give you all sorts of data in terms of what search terms is your site showing up for? What's your click through rate for some of those search terms? You know, what's the rate in which somebody is clicking on your result for that search term?
00:09:18
Speaker
So lots of really interesting information there. So it doesn't hurt just to go and spend 10 to 15 minutes clicking around there, filtering the data, taking a look at maybe what your website is appearing for.
00:09:30
Speaker
Okay. Yeah. I mean, that's pretty easy to do and pretty straightforward.
Integrating Google Analytics with Website Builders
00:09:33
Speaker
Absolutely. And that's a good place to start. And remember, you can always, you know, iterate on that a little bit more as you learn. But that's what I would do. Submit site maps, spend some time in the performance tab. Okay. Our second step in that checking the health of your website is to set up Google Analytics. So tell me more about what is Google Analytics, what you can find there.
00:09:52
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Google Analytics is going to give you detailed information around site traffic. Google Search Console, Google Analytics give you some overlapping information, but whereas Google Search Console is basically showing you how well your site plays with search, Google Analytics is going to give you more data about your search traffic specifically.
00:10:11
Speaker
Another place where you go and you can be overwhelmed right off the bat with all of that different data. There's a few things that I would do in Google Analytics or I would focus on specifically so that you don't get overwhelmed. What are those areas?
00:10:29
Speaker
Awesome. So first, when you set it up, you know, again, like Google Search Console, Google Analytics will walk you through how to set it up. A lot of modern website builders, like I said, show it. I think this is true of Squarespace and Wix as well. There's basically going to be a field where you can put your Google Analytics code.
00:10:46
Speaker
It says like UA and then it's maybe seven or eight numbers. So it's really straightforward to just add it to your site. And then if you're on show it, you'll want to make sure you hit publish so that your site is live with that code and you probably won't see any data for another day.
00:11:01
Speaker
Yeah, and you can test whether it's working. Google Analytics has sort of a real-time tab, you know, so you can publish it and then go to a page on your website, maybe from an incognito browser, and just make sure that it's all set up and running. I will say that the code itself is actually changing a little bit. Google Analytics just rolled out with Google Analytics 4, so what you just explained might be outdated in about a year or so.
00:11:23
Speaker
But again, it's kind of like Google Search Console. This stuff is always evolving. And Google actually does a pretty good job of giving you directions on how to set it up on your website. And with something like Show It, Squarespace, Wix, those kinds of modern website builders, they're always going to make it fairly easy to set up and integrate.
00:11:40
Speaker
With WordPress, it can be easy as well, but we recommend the use of a tool like Monster Insights. Now, there's probably some debate. I know some people might say, well, it's another plugin and it might slow down your website a little bit, but I think the trade-off is worth it. One, especially if you're doing e-commerce type stuff, a tool like Monster Insights is going to make it easy to set up all of that stuff without being super technical because it can get technical to set up the advanced features of Google Analytics.
00:12:09
Speaker
But then it's also going to aggregate data in a way that makes more sense, right? Because that's the problem, right? You get into Google Analytics and maybe you're just kind of overwhelmed with the information and where everything is. So Monster Insights, you can actually get reports for their own dashboards that I think are just a little less overwhelming for people to understand.
00:12:30
Speaker
So if you're using something like Monster Insights, would you just skip looking at the data in Google Analytics? You'd look at all of it in Monster Insights because it's more straightforward. Yeah, I mean you could for sure and that might be a good starting place. I still like getting to Google Analytics because it is probably still going to give you more detailed data.
00:12:48
Speaker
in different places. But I think where I'd spend most of my time is looking at traffic trends. That's, you know, I think going to be the most interesting thing for people as well as they get into Google Analytics. So looking at referral sources, so you can actually go and find, okay, well, where is most of my traffic coming from? And you can see, okay, well, I have a lot of traffic come from social and it will actually break down
00:13:10
Speaker
you know, how much is coming from Pinterest and Facebook. And it's really not difficult to get to those spots. Alright, so in the left hand tab, in the left hand navigation, there's a bunch of different and they change every so often and how they group together change every so often. But basically you can click in there. Again, it's another place where there's not a whole whole lot you can do to, you know, quote unquote, break things.
00:13:34
Speaker
Really, I think if you click the wrong button, maybe you'll filter traffic or filter your data in a weird way, but all of that kind of stuff can be reset. So I would check out referral sources, check out where your traffic's coming from, and then go to I think it's behavior and you can look at all of your pages, how much traffic each of those pages are getting, and then other useful metrics there.
00:13:56
Speaker
It can be really helpful in figuring out which of the content you share is the most popular too because that may give you a better idea of what kinds of content to create in the future.
00:14:06
Speaker
Yeah, and we've definitely blog stuff before that, you know, maybe we didn't expect to be like a hit or to be, to show up for a popular search term. Right. And then it does. And it's, you know, only by going to Google analytics or Google search console that we, we figure out, Oh, wow. You know, this post is actually generating a lot of traffic, you know, and, or some posts that are, that seem to be doing well.
00:14:29
Speaker
And again, this is maybe a little bit more advanced, so I hesitate even saying it. But in Google Search Console, you can see like, oh, what terms am I showing up for and showing up around ranking in spots maybe 9 to 12, right on the border between pages 1 and 2. And you go and adjust those articles to see if you can push those up in the search results at all.
00:14:51
Speaker
Anyways, in terms of how you use that information, I think what happens is people say, I want to learn Google Analytics and think that they're going to go in there and then they're going to solve all their website problems by putting together some crazy analysis, right? Right, or get more traffic because they've set it up.
00:15:08
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And that's not really the case. And I think that's a good way to get overwhelmed is to get in there and be like, and then you have that question like, what do I do now? And you feel almost like, well, people tell me analytics is important. So I need to do something with this data. Right. And you can, but I would focus rather on the problem on a problem you're trying to solve, you know, and so I think people get in there, and they don't have a problem necessarily, maybe they're happy with the amount of inquiries they're getting or whatnot.
00:15:34
Speaker
and they get in there and they notice a page has a higher bounce rate than they'd like. Then they spend all this time trying to improve the bounce rate of that site, but with no real objective in mind. Just because they think that their bounce rate needs to be at a certain point. It's not really moving the needle. I would focus on the problem that you're trying to solve and make sure that you understand where analytics fits into that picture. If you feel like your contact page isn't converting, there's probably a number of factors there.
00:16:02
Speaker
Google Analytics might help you solve that problem to a certain extent or a website speed test might help you solve that problem to a certain extent, but I would keep the larger picture in mind anytime you're using that data. Okay. That's really helpful to know. Don't go in there and just think, oh, I'm going to look at this data and all of a sudden I'm going to like, no, I need to adjust these things.
00:16:24
Speaker
Number three, this is fun for me because I think I spent four hours doing this for our hosting clients yesterday, but run a website audit. So do you want to explain what a website audit is and how you run one?
00:16:37
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely.
Conducting a Website Audit
00:16:38
Speaker
So website audits provide information about your website's health, especially as it relates to search. I think, you know, when we think about a website audit, we're typically thinking about it in the context of doing search engine optimization, but it's going to give you all sorts of information about your website, even beyond. I think maybe things that are just search specific, you know, it can be helpful because it can reveal things like broken links, you know, which regardless of whether your objective is to rank higher in search, you want to make sure that there's not a ton of broken links on your website.
00:17:05
Speaker
Right. Or broken images too, which a broken image probably isn't going to impact you too much in Google search results. But if somebody gets one of your blog posts and all of the images are gone, that's not helpful for getting people to work with you. Yeah. And in that case, it would absolutely impact how that page ranks in search for sure.
00:17:24
Speaker
But yeah, I mean these things, it's going to give you a nice 360-degree view of your website and probably just like the other two tools, Google Search Console and Google Analytics, maybe even too much information. Yeah, I know that when I send out our audit reports to our hosting clients, for most of the points that I'm giving somebody, if somebody's website says that they have
00:17:47
Speaker
10 broken internal links. Most people don't know what a broken internal link is. So I often have to be more technical and explain to somebody with a video how to fix that. So I think that that is one thing with these audits that it's going to tell you that something is broken or something's not working, but it doesn't normally tell you how to fix it.
00:18:05
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think some of the better tools will tell you how to fix it. But yeah, I mean, I think that this is one of those things where it can be helpful to have a little bit of context and you should go into it, especially if you've never gone into it before saying, okay, I'm gonna learn one or two things here about my website and focus on correcting those. But in general, I think that there's certain things that you should pay attention to. Okay. And so can you elaborate on what those are?
00:18:30
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So whenever I'm running an audit, especially if it's just for our own site, and ironically, right, we probably have, it's one of those things where if we're, we're almost probably more thorough with other with client sites than we are on site. So when we have the time to do this for our own site, I am, you know, making sure that nothing's broken.
00:18:50
Speaker
All right, and so there's a handful of errors that if I see that I'm like, ah, okay, that might need to be fixed. So any 400 and 500 errors, so a 400 error might be like a 404 error, so like a page can't be found for some reason. So if you deleted a blog post or unpublished a blog post and something is linking to that post still, that might give you that error or you didn't redirect it to another page.
00:19:13
Speaker
Absolutely. And in some cases you might have, you know, just deleted the post and that's fine and never got any traffic and so whatever, right? But in some cases you might be like, no, that page should be live or oh, I should have redirected that page elsewhere. So you want to track down that error and fix it and create the proper redirect to fix that error. And something like Yoast Pro will automatically do that, which is something I
00:19:35
Speaker
Well, it will give you the option. Whenever you delete a post, if you have a tool like Yoast SEO Pro, when you delete a post, a pop-up will appear and it will say, do you want to redirect this post? And that's super helpful. It makes things super quick. Whereas if you don't use a tool like that, then you have to go in and manually add them all.
00:19:54
Speaker
Yeah, using a tool like Redirections or some other plugin. And again, if you're interested in how to create redirects in your website platform, just type in redirects and then your website platform and a help article will appear. But I'm looking for those sorts of things, broken links and broken images for sure. That can happen every once in a while where
00:20:13
Speaker
you know all the sudden all the images of a blog post are broken for some reason so especially if the blog post that gets a decent amount of traffic you know stuff like that you wanna fix i want to look at any pages that can't be or are not indexed what that means is that they're not in google's index right
00:20:30
Speaker
Which isn't always a bad thing. Some pages you might not want to be indexed, such as your pricing page. I know that some plugins will create extra pages and extra bits of code, and those don't always get indexed, which is fine because you may not want those indexed on your site. Yeah, absolutely. There are typically a decent amount of pages on a website that you might not want indexed. Password protected pages, of course, you don't want showing up in Google's index.
00:20:54
Speaker
Yeah, if you have client resources, like specific client resources that are quote unquote hidden, right? You want to make sure that those aren't indexed as well. But I want to look through there. I want to make sure that for instance, my homepage is definitely indexed, right? So I want to focus on those types of things. Redirect loops would be another one where I think that this is something that's on our mind or something that we look up for specifically just because our site is years and years, probably almost a decade old.
00:21:18
Speaker
right? So what happens is we delete a page, redirect it to another page, you know, and then we eventually update that page or, you know, and then we create another redirect. And all of a sudden we have this like, either we have a situation where we have, you know, four or five redirects. So instead of getting somebody from point A to point D, you know, they have to go through B and C first, right? Or we have a situation where
00:21:42
Speaker
we're redirecting to a page and that page is redirecting back to the page that we just tried to redirect from and it creates what's called an infinite redirect loop. And if your site is brand new, you probably don't have to worry about this. Yeah, exactly. But our site is 10 or 11 years old at this point. So we have all, we've blogged about all sorts of different things. We have photography on this domain and like all sorts of things. So we definitely have that issue with our site.
00:22:06
Speaker
Yeah, and basically, you know, I'm looking for things that are broken. Like I said, there's a whole handful of things that I don't think matter quite as much that I want to be mindful of. But like when people run an audit, they'll get like, you know, especially if there's I told her 5000 errors or 5000 warnings, and you're like, Oh, my God,
00:22:23
Speaker
Yeah, that'll happen too a lot. I see that most often if somebody's, if you switch from like a HTTP version of your site, so an unsecure to the HTTPS version of your site and you don't do like a bulk update of your image links, you might get like 5,000 images or linking to what is called mixed content. Sure. And that's pretty minor.
00:22:45
Speaker
Yeah, for sure.
SEO Considerations: Titles and Tools
00:22:46
Speaker
And that's my point is that like some of these warnings, right? I mean, you want to make sure that you update your URLs, especially, you know, you don't want mixed content on your website. But more so than that, like you'll get an error that's like your titles are too long, right now. And at the end of the day, that doesn't really hurt you. When it when it comes to ranking, you know, what that might impact is whether if somebody can't read the full title, maybe they don't click on your result in Google, like just by your title being long, it's not like Google's penalizing you for that or something like that.
00:23:14
Speaker
And so we have situations all the time where our titles are a little bit too long. And I'm not going to go back and fix all of our titles that are too long because it's just, in my opinion, it's not worth our time to do that. It's not going to move the needle enough. So it's stuff like that where typically I might glance at it, but in general, not going to spend a ton of time there fixing things because a lot of times it won't move the needle for us.
00:23:38
Speaker
Right. If your site says something like an error as opposed to a warning, you probably want to fix the errors over just the warnings. Yeah, that's a great distinction. We should have started with that. That's a great distinction. So where can people run an audit and are they free or do you typically have to pay for them?
00:23:53
Speaker
I would say that there are both free and paid tools as there usually are. The paid tools are typically a little bit more detailed than the free tools, where there's just some limitations around the free tools, like how many pages they will crawl on your website. So something to keep in mind, good paid tools that we've used before are PowerSuite, SEMrush, and Moz. A lot of these, though, are going to be relatively expensive for just the, you know, quote unquote casual user, I guess.
00:24:19
Speaker
And then you have free tools like Ubersuggest, which again, if you're just kind of checking in, might be worth doing. I mean, that's probably where if I wasn't somebody who was doing SEO audits for people all the time, right? That's probably, I probably try to use a tool like that. Or you can pay someone to run an audit for you. And this might, you know, and again, obviously, like as somebody who runs SEO audits, you know, you can go get a till, for instance, till agency to do SEO work for you. And then again, depending on
00:24:45
Speaker
what services of ours people invest in, they might get access to this as well. But one of the nice things about having somebody run an audit for you is that you're not paying that monthly subscription for the tool. I mean, obviously you're going to be paying for the service, but you get additional context and that can be really helpful. So you don't have to go through all the effort and energy and time figuring out what do I need to fix or what doesn't really matter right now and then how do I fix it, right?
00:25:11
Speaker
So that can be helpful and typically something that I think is worthwhile once a year to do, even if on the other quarters of the year, you're just doing a free audit somewhere.
Improving Page Speed and Image Optimization
00:25:24
Speaker
Cool. Next up, testing the speed of your website.
00:25:28
Speaker
Awesome. We talked about this quite a bit, so I'll try to keep this brief because this next point that we're going to get to I think is maybe one of the more important ones of the day. But a website speed test, it measures the speed of pages on your website. And I think that's an important distinction to make. People go and they run a website speed test on their homepage and it loads in 2.5 seconds and they're like, all the pages of my website load in 2.5 seconds, right? Whereas a blog that might have 100 images on it if you're a photographer, that page is likely going to take a little bit more time to load than
00:25:57
Speaker
a blog post from a writer who's just publishing text. Different pages require different resources and there's going to be some variation in how quickly those pages load. This is important because people typically don't wait around for
00:26:16
Speaker
Slow sites to load. And there's varying timelines and stuff, and there's benchmarks too. I mean, aiming for the two-second mark is, I think, the typical advice. I would say sometimes for a photographer, for instance, or somebody who has a media-heavy site, that can be difficult.
00:26:35
Speaker
The other thing that's challenging too is, and maybe I'm getting ahead of myself here, but the other thing that's challenging as well is depending on what website platform you're on, there's going to be limited stuff that you can do to actually improve the speed of your website. Well, and your website host.
00:26:54
Speaker
Well, that's what I mean. If you're on Squarespace, let's say, Squarespace hosts your website. It's not like you can be like, hey, Squarespace, can I get access to my server settings? Most of us don't want anything to do with our server settings anyways, which is why something like we trust a platform like Showit, for instance, is going to optimize servers so that Showit websites run well on them. Yeah, and Showit websites are generally pretty fast.
00:27:18
Speaker
Yeah. So I would say, fortunately, you know, it's kind of like everything else, you're gonna get a lot of stuff that you might not know what it means. Right. And honestly, depending on what website platform you're on might not even have access to fix. But fortunately, there are things that you can do. And one of the biggest things to do is optimizing images.
00:27:35
Speaker
Yes, so my general, I get asked this question at least once a day. My general rule of thumb is that you want to export your images on the long side about 1.5 times the size that they appear at on your website. So if I'm doing a bulk export of images for a client site that I'm working on, I'm probably going to export most of them to be about 1200 pixels on the long side.
00:28:00
Speaker
And at that size, they generally load pretty quickly and they still have a great quality. If it's an image that is going to span the entire width of the page, I generally make that like 1600 to 1800 pixels wide. And that's just to make sure that it is still crisp as it goes across really big desktop browsers.
00:28:19
Speaker
Recently, I put out a video tutorial showing you how to optimize your images after you've sized them using this free website, although you can pay for it too if you want to do bulk images, Tiny JPEG, Tiny PNG. And I found that even after I'm sizing down images with Photoshop or with Blog Stomp and getting them to be a pretty good size, if I run those images through Tiny JPEG, Tiny PNG again,
00:28:48
Speaker
I can reduce the size of them by about 60% and not affect the quality at all, which is huge, especially if your site is really sluggish because of images. For a lot of the people we work with, their sites are slow because they want big, beautiful images on their sites. I think that's a great way to reduce your images.
00:29:06
Speaker
Yeah. And so we'll link to all those resources in the show notes for sure. And you've created a number of tutorials about this. So if you have questions, it's probably easier to watch you go through this. So head on over to the show notes, click on one of the tutorials, and there's all sorts of tools out there that help. Beyond what you mentioned, Short Pixel. I mean, there's just so many out there that make this, I think, fairly easy, especially if you're on a WordPress website.
00:29:31
Speaker
Right. So, check those out for sure. If you're on WordPress as well, look into adding a CDN to your website. Of course, that will depend a little bit on your host as well. And a caching plugin like WP Rocket I think is what we use, which has been historically pretty good for us with some hiccups here. Yeah, it definitely has hiccups. Sure. Like any plugin I think though.
00:29:52
Speaker
I also advise if you're on WordPress or if you have a WordPress blog, there are plugins that you can install and we'll link to one that can help you track down images that are in your media library that are not being used on your website. Those images are going to contribute to the overall size of your website, but they're not actually being displayed anywhere on your site, which is just going to make your site heavier and a little bit slower. When it comes to images too, we're often asked if people should go back and resize older images.
00:30:20
Speaker
I think that for blog posts, if it's a post that doesn't have a lot of traffic, that's probably okay. But if it's a post that has a lot of traffic, you can tell that the pins have been shared frequently on Pinterest. If you replace those images, you're going to lose the links to those images. So something like short pixel or what's another one?
00:30:41
Speaker
There's some plugins that you can install trying to think there's another like tiny. It's not tiny JPEG. It's I can't remember image if I yeah image and that's I think made by WP rocket. Yes, there's a third one too. That's really popular. You can install those and it takes a long time and it slows down your site a bit. So I typically only recommend running them at night.
00:30:59
Speaker
Yeah, whenever you have the least amount of traffic. But it's going to go in and resize the images that are already on your website. It won't do it within the show it editor part of your website. This would just be for WordPress. But if you have a history of uploading huge blog post images and you know that you can see in a search result that that is what's slowing down your website, that might be something that's helpful to do because then you won't break your images and you don't have to do quite as much hands-on work. But going forward, I would just make sure that you upload properly sized images.
00:31:28
Speaker
Absolutely. That's, I think, good advice. So we didn't talk about where you can go to actually test your website speed. Yeah, there's so many out there. We like Pingdom. Pingdom is pretty quick and easy. I think it gives you pretty straightforward answers on things. We can link to a few other popular ones as well. Google speed test. A lot of them will test for both your desktop and your mobile version of your site.
00:31:52
Speaker
Yeah, and as we're about to talk about mobile version becoming that much more important. And I would say that even, you know, with a website speed test, like everything else, you know, don't get bogged down in things that don't really move the needle, you know, things like reducing image size, those types of things really can improve the speed of a website. So maybe start with those. And then if you have some extra time, as if anybody has extra time out there, you can focus on some of the other
00:32:16
Speaker
Adding expires headers and all the crazy things that you're going to have to Google how to do most likely. So this next thing, Google is making a big update come March 2021 and people should be on the lookout for it. So Davey, I think you all have us on edge. What is this big
Mobile-First Indexing and Site Responsiveness
00:32:34
Speaker
update?
00:32:34
Speaker
So a few years ago, just to some history, I can't remember exactly when I want to say maybe 2019. It might have been earlier than that. Google moved to a mobile first index. So in that regards, nothing's nothing different, right? We've always we've known for a number of years now, how important the mobile version of your website is one to have a mobile version of your website. And then to that
00:32:56
Speaker
Yeah, the mobile version of your website, it was easily usable. Google is taking an extra step though now. Google is moving, so they've already moved to a mobile first index, but they're basically dropping desktop content from their index. Okay. Can you explain what that means? Absolutely.
00:33:18
Speaker
That means that if you have resources that are only available on the desktop version of your website, they will no longer be available or they will no longer be indexed. Does that make sense? Basically, only the stuff on the mobile version of your website will be indexed by Google.
00:33:39
Speaker
Okay, so that's good to know. So if you have, let's say, a video that is only displaying on your website home page for desktop and it's hidden on mobile, Google's not going to index the desktop version of that video, for example.
00:33:53
Speaker
Yes, that's right. For Showit, for instance, for those of you with Showit's website, one of the great things about Showit is that you can really have a mobile specific version of your website. When people are accessing a page via mobile, it really can look different than desktop. That's a good thing for a lot of different reasons because there might be different assets that just don't display well on mobile or it's too much for mobile. I've done that with things like maps on about pages that hover over where people travel.
00:34:19
Speaker
There just wasn't an easy way to have somebody hover over Washington DC and California on mobile and have them see the text. And it wasn't a key feature of somebody of their website anyways. So we hit it on mobile. Yeah. And probably still, you know, for this update, right? So somebody's asking, well, now that resource won't be indexed by Google. That's probably okay.
00:34:40
Speaker
But if there are things on your desktop site that you know are on the mobile version of your website that you want indexed by Google, you need to take care of that. And if you were wondering whether you have a mobile-friendly site, you can check, fortunately, Google has a mobile-friendly test that I'd recommend going to.
00:34:58
Speaker
throwing your URL in there and it'll tell you whether your site is mobile friendly or not. But if you only have a desktop version of your website, then likely your site will not be indexed by Google. This is also true for people who have m.sites. So it used to be, I haven't seen one of these actually for a long time. But the mobile versions of some people's site used to live at a subdomain. So you'd go to the site and it would be like m.facebook.com or something like that.
00:35:27
Speaker
And now things just respond, you know? So if you go to a, you go to, for instance, Davey and Christa, you know, you just type DaveyandChrista.com and if you're on a mobile device, it renders in your mobile device, right? So if that's the case for you, then you're all set. If you do have an m.site, Google has announced that there will be bugs with m.sites. This is even better that they're not fixing those bugs, you know? It's just crazy.
00:35:52
Speaker
Just moving us forward. It's helpful that at least announced that so people with m.mobile sites don't sit there waiting for Google to fix that. I would think that many people who listen to this podcast don't have m. sites. I think it's worth mentioning though. Anyways, point being is go to Google's mobile friendly test. You can just type in Google mobile friendly into Google and it will be the first result throwing your URL and you'll be able to tell whether you have a mobile friendly website or not. This is one of those things that if you don't have a mobile friendly website,
00:36:20
Speaker
Maybe you can fix it on your own. It's pretty technical, I would think. Yeah. But I would say mostly, you'll probably have to go back to a designer or a developer in order to get help with that. Of course, if you are using a modern website platform, you should be all set. I'd be really surprised if, for instance, you're on show it, for instance, and you don't have... I don't think that's possible. It might not be formatted though.
00:36:44
Speaker
I was going to say make sure it's formatted okay because I see a lot of people who only focus on desktop when they're designing and then they get to the end of their project and they turn on their mobile view and they've added text and rearranged things and their shapes covering buttons and so it can feel really defeating at that point. And so just make sure that you're always paying attention to both the desktop version of your site and your mobile version of your site if you're editing it just to make sure that things are still clickable and editable and easy for humans to view.
00:37:14
Speaker
Yeah. The last thing that I would say about that is, you know, does that mean desktop doesn't matter anymore? No, of course, desktop still matters. People still access websites over desktop. We actually over the last the course of the last year, most of our traffic comes from desktop. It's probably 6040. And it's been pretty consistently 6040 desktop over mobile for us for the last year. And there's probably good reason for that. You know, when people are looking at websites, they want to be able to see both the desktop version and the mobile version.
00:37:41
Speaker
Yeah, I would think that websites wouldn't be a huge thing that people shop from their phones for because you just don't get a sense of exactly what it looks like.
00:37:48
Speaker
Yeah, and we're working with a lot of business owners who are probably at a desk, working on a desktop computer throughout the day. Whereas if you are direct to consumer, I'd be pretty surprised if most of your traffic isn't from mobile. Oh yeah, I'm sure Amazon is like high mobile. When I order my groceries online, I use the Walmart app. I'm sure there are so many companies like that or even depending on what you do and what you sell, you might see the opposite. You might see 60% or 70% mobile traffic and a much higher percentage
00:38:18
Speaker
of desktop users, especially if you're marketing to wedding couples. Yeah, for sure.
Recap and Resources for Website Health
00:38:25
Speaker
So anyways, those are five different ways that you can check the health of your website, make sure that your website is optimized. Again, each of these things I think has, you can go 10, 12, 20 levels deep with it.
00:38:38
Speaker
I would very much encourage you to focus on what you know, and if you don't know anything about the tool you're using, try to learn one, maybe two things. Focus there, start there, and then move on. I think, again, one of the advantages of hiring a designer to build your website is that you know you get something hopefully when the project is done that's
00:38:59
Speaker
works fairly well. So unless you've built your own website, hopefully when you do your audit, for instance, you don't find 5,000 errors or whatever. But even if you do, again, try not to let it overwhelm you. Focus on the problem that you're trying to solve. Solving a quote unquote bounce rate problem in and of itself really doesn't matter, right?
00:39:20
Speaker
You want to focus on problems that actually move the needle like, oh, how can I get more people to submit inquiries on my website? That's a worthwhile problem to solve. How can I make sure every single page on my website loads in 1.85 seconds? Yeah, that's a tricky thing.
00:39:36
Speaker
Also, I want to add that if you guys get into your testing your website's health and you find anything that is super overwhelming, feel free to email us at support at Davian and Krista.com and we will try to add tutorials to our YouTube tutorial library to cover some of these errors. And if you head to youtube.com slash Davian and Krista, we have a big resource library that actually covers some of the things that we've mentioned today.
00:40:00
Speaker
Absolutely. And we're always looking for additional content to share, so your questions really help with that. Thanks for tuning in. All right. Thanks, guys. Thanks for tuning in to the Brands That Book Show. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing and leaving a review in iTunes. For show notes and other resources, head on over to dvandchrista.com.
00:40:30
Speaker
you